TNIAAM at 10: One angry dwarf and 44,444 solemn faces

Ten years ago this Saturday, my great-grandfather, Sheamus McKeeley, started an import/export company out of Dublin, Ireland know as Turlough Nunally is a Quare Morrígan. Over the years, the business emigrated with the family to Syracuse, NY where my grandfather changed the name to Troy Nunes is an Absolute Magician in order to make it easier for locals to understand. Unfortunately, he didn't speak English at the time and didn't realize that the new name was still undecipherable.

Eventually, the business was handed down and I decided to take it in a different direction. No more importing. No more exporting. From now on, we'd strive to be the second- or third-best source of Syracuse Orange sports coverage that you could find on the internet. So many years later, I feel like we've finally met that goal.

I'm already mostly uncomfortable with the praise heaped on the site this week so I won't say too much except thank you to everyone who has ever read, commented, or contributed on TNIAAM. From the very early Blogspot days when I'd get unreasonably excited just to see one comment on a post I'd written, to the days when traffic would explode because our a link got picked up on Fark.com, to the SB Nation Era with it's FanPosts and two-factor authentication, it's always been fun to be a part of this site. And I do believe I'm just a part of this. Without people reading, sharing, commenting, and pointing out my spelling mistakes, it's just me writing poorly in a vacuum.

I do want to take a moment to say thank you to the many people who came aboard as writers and editors on the site. I resisted the urge to bring on other people for a really long time, partly out of ego and partly out of an unreasonable expectation I set for TNIAAM. Based on what I can tell, the first TNIAAM post not written by me came in November 2010 courtesy of Hoya Suxa himself, Matt Glaude. Dan Lyons came aboard in March 2011, John Cassillo entered the fray in January 2012, and so did Jeremy Ryan. From there the floodgates opened and folks like Jared Smith, StrawHatGuy, ShariCuse, Matt McClusky, Aaron Goldfarb, Sean Farrell, FeloniousPhunk, Andy Pregler, and others added their voices to the fold. Since then many more writers have joined the site as well and I would name them all but I would surely miss at least a couple so just assume that I wouldn't have forgotten your name if I didn't include you here.

A special moment of thanks to John, who has basically become de facto day editor of the site at this point. There are weeks when I'm pretty sure John either wrote or edited 90 percent of the content on the site and I'm grateful to have someone stuck in the suck with me when I'm unable to keep up the pace I used to. Blogging is a young-ish person's game. John is that young-ish person.

Then there's the commenters who stuck with us for years. YEARS. There are usernames in the TNIAAM comments that I know better than some of the people I interact with in real life. Personalities that have not only shaped the conversations going on here but also guided new commenters as they learned how we do things around here. Even you, Will Junior, wherever you are. Without you we wouldn't have #HonorYourContract and we'd be worse off for it.

Which reminds me of the memes and references we've all created here together. Gregisms! Remember Gregisms, you guys? Nothing made me happier than knowing people enjoyed The Octonion back when I had time for such things. I will never see Syracuse score a touchdown or win a basketball game and not wonder if someone has put the Dancing Floyd Little GIF up in the Gamethread. So many situations in my life bring to mind whether or not someone is a #DisloyalIdiot and whether or not someone needs to go Foodlion themselves. These are dumb things, but they're our dumb things.

On a personal note, this site has been the catalyst for me to transition from a disillusioned & bored office drone into a full-time writer and blogger, and that still amazes me to this day. This site eventually begat other writing gigs, a book, preview magazines, an adjunct professorship at SU, and gave me the ability to spend my days as a laptop hobo in coffee shops across the Pacific Northwest and I will always be grateful for that.

I don't know if I ever expected to see TNIAAM reach a ten-year anniversary. Or maybe I figured the site would but I wouldn't still be here. And yet here we all are. We haven't changed the world (yet) but I hope this site has made it fun to be a Syracuse fan in times when it doesn't seem all that fun. Those of us who were here for Greg Robinson know how much we needed to laugh and share the misery that was being an Orange. I also hope it's still a place people like to go when there's breaking news or Jim Boeheim says something harsh (but true). The original site tagline was "Light on statistics. Heavy on smartassery." We've increased the statistics over the years, but I like to think the smartassery remains.

Thanks for reading and participating. Let's have another ten years of smartassery, shall we?

G'ORANGE!